Though most of the country celebrated Columbus Day on Monday, October, 13th, Seattle, Minneapolis and other cities refused to honor the explorer and proclaimed a new festival called “Indigenous Peoples Day.” The activists behind the change blame Columbus because his discovery of the New World led to devastating results for native tribes.

But a political commentator and attorney named Rob Dickson raises a brilliant objection to this argument: if Columbus hadn’t found a way to the New World, someone else would have made the discovery eventually. If those discoverers had been Chinese instead of European, would they have treated the natives with more respect? Would the world have gained had Islamic sailors from the Ottoman Empire, or sea-farers from Czarist Russia, made the big find?

There still would have been grim consequences for indigenous cultures but the world might never have benefited from the United States.